What Happened to All the Prostitutes?

 
I knew that would get your attention.

But this is just a sidebar item that came up as I was researching a Chicago photographer named Alfred Brisbois. At the time of the 1880 Census, Brisbois was living in a boarding house in Leadville, Colorado, along with people whose occupations were listed as saloon keeper, miner, prospector, roustabout, and – yes, the reason you're still reading – prostitute. Hey, it was the Wild West.

The raciest picture ever to appear on Sempringham.

I've looked at a lot of census records in the last 40 years, and I've come across prostitutes there before, but it still got me wondering: How have census takers handled the issue of ladies of the evening over the years? So I took a few minutes to try and find out, and here is what I discovered.

Before 1850, the U.S. Census recorded the name of only the "head of household" of each family.  Everyone else was just counted in "number of males 10-18, number of females 10-18" and so on. No occupation, no country of birth, no information about the parents. The 1850 census was the first to record a name, age, and occupation for each person it counted. Genealogists everywhere are forever in its debt.

Out of curiousity, I searched the decennial censuses for "prostitute," and it gave me the following numbers.

1850 - 0
1860 - 0
1870 - 0
1880 - 4,723
1890 - 0 (The 1890 census was destroyed by a fire at the Commerce Department in Washington, D.C., on Jan 10, 1921. Records of only 6,160 of the 62,979,766 people enumerated survived.)
1900 - 2 (one in Delaware, one in Texas)
1910 - 6 (five in Montanta, one in Wyoming)
1920 - 0
1930 - 0

For privacy reasons, the 1930 census is the last one that is currently available to the public.

Wanting to be careful in my research, I pulled out my Roget's Thesaurus, looked for synonyms of "prostitute," then searched for the synonyms. The only thing that got hits was "concubine":

1850 - 0
1860 - 0
1870 - 0
1880 - 25
1890 - 0
1900 - 929
1910 - 326
1920 - 19
1930 - 0

So what happened there? Was there an outbreak of concubinage at the turn of the last century?

Drilling down into the numbers, looking at the individual census entries, the word "concubine" appears in the relationship field (denoting their relationship to the "head of household"), rather than the occupation field, where the description "prostitute" appeared. The "concubines" were women who lived with a man, with children that shared the man's last name, even though the women did not. They lived in the South: Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Texas, Virginia, Kentucky. And guess what! They're black. So there's obviously something else going on there – something in the mind of the census taker, maybe?

Anyway, I thought this was all weird enough to share, even if I'm not sure what it means.